Customer Reviews

Immortal Captives: The Story of 600 Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy

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As a collateral descendant of one of the Immortal 600, Captain Harris Kollock Harrison, I am pleased to see this shameful episode of American history documented. Mauriel Phillips Joslyn has performed a very scholarly investigation not only into the treatment of the Immortal 600 but also into the fanatical thinking that was responsible for Federal prisoner policies during the war. Given the increasingly plastic and shallow views of the war being fed by the mainstream media and academia to the public about the war, "Immortal Captives" is a badly needed tonic, and, moreover, a reminder that Lincoln's war to preserve the Union by force was no altruistic exercise in human rights.

If you want to buy just one book about American POW camps during the Civil War, this would be an excellent one.
Using primary sources, the Federal Official Records ( O.R), 60 pages of footnotes and bibliographies, the mountain of evidence is overwhelming.
Why did the Union force the Confederate POWs to slowly die from staravation, is found in this book.
Why did Lincoln allow the Union to use these 600 Confederate POW officers to be used as HUMAN SHIELDS is also answered.
No this book isn't fiction; it is part of Americas shameful past it tries to keep hidden.
The truth will always come to the surface.
Mauriel Joslyn has done an excellet job with this book.

Any book that casts Southerners in a favorable light and especially any book that criticizes the Yankee victors is immediately suspect. As a Southerner, even one whose great grandfather served under one of the Immortal 600, I must confess to having held this book suspect. The book is not great literature as Ms. Joscelyn's connective prose is oftimes laborious. That said, the quotes from the officers' diaries and letters are powerful and evocative. I consider myself a thorough student and hardened reader of War Between the States literature and must confess to having failed to supress a tear from time to time. It is inconceivable to the modern American that the United States would have willfully and maliciously treated fellow human beings the way these men were treated The book will never be a best seller, but should be a must read for the student of the formative event of modern America.

Immortal Captives: The Story of 600 Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy draws upon authentic primary sources - personal letters, diaries, and written testimonies of Confederate veterans - to reveal a shocking, largely untold true story of the North's inhumanity toward Confederate prisoners of war. In 1864, President Lincoln and his war council canceled the prisoner exchange program, and the Union army refused to release hundreds of captures Confederate soldiers. In retaliation to the horror stories they heard of the treatment of Union soldiers, they made examples of six hundred Confederates by keeping them in horrific conditions. Subject to starvation, torture, disease, and even use as human shields, these brave Americans suffered unthinkable cruelty at the hands other Americans. Not for the faint of heart, Immortal Captives grounds itself heavily in meticulous and thorough research. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this somber testimony that the Union was by no means innocent in the American Civil War.

It is a mistake to believe that the treatment of the "Immortal 600" was in retaliation for what was presented as the inhumane treatment of Union prisoners by the Confederacy. In fact, with few exceptions, POW camps in the North were hell-holes of the worst type long before any evidence was forthcoming of supposed inhumanity on the part of the Confederates. In fact, camps like "Hell"mira (Elmira), Douglas, Merton, Point Lookout and others routinely tortured, starved, and murdered their helpless prisoners more as retaliation for the "rebellious nature" of the people of the South who dared to stand against the "noble" and "glorious" Union than anything at all to do with the treatment of Northern prisoners of war.

Attempts by Confederate Col. Ould (who lead efforts at prisoner exchange) to get help for suffering Union prisoners were routinely denied to the point at which Ould in a letter to his Union counterpart marveled at what kind of men they were who preferred that there own soldiers suffer and die when they could be saved without costing the Union one Confederate prisoner in exchange. Ould asked for food and medicine for sick and suffering prisoners with the promise that only those prisoners would receive said supplies. Finally the Confederate government simply shipped the worst among the ill from Andersonville north at which time the Union government had a propaganda field day photographing the wasted bodies of men whom the South had tried to exchange for long months without success. These photographs were then widely published and the subsequent outrage led to the Congress of the United States proclaiming the following:

"Rebel prisoners in our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding its parallels only in the conduct of savage tribes and resulting in the death of multitudes by the slow but designed process of starvation and by mortal diseases occasioned by insufficient and unhealthy food and wanton exposure of their persons to the inclemency of the weather."

-- Official U.S. Policy on Confederate Prisoners of War (Preamble to the H.R. 97, passed by both Houses of Congress)

Of course, what the Northern politicians failed to mention was that the treatment of "rebel prisoners" had been savage and horrible long before Andersonville had been built. However, the condition of these unfortunate men presented to a shocked public in unsparing black and white photographs allowed that treatment to be masked with hypocritical righteous indignation. As a result, an already existing policy of inhumanity toward Confederate prisoners was able to masquerade as a matter of "retaliation".

Nowhere is the "double standard" regarding the treatment of prisoners of war more apparent than in the trial and execution of Col. Henry Wirz, the Commandant of Andersonville who was allowed little representation at his "trial" and those Union prisoners who came forth to testify on his behalf were not permitted to do so. On the other hand, Col. Sweet, Commandant of Camp Douglas - a REAL concentration camp - was feted by the citizens of Chicago even after he had illegally arrested many of them for ostensibly planning prison breaks! Chicago holds the largest mass grave in North America, filled with the poor, broken bodies of soldiers confined in Camp Douglas, (referred to in a recent television program as "80 acres of hell").

The author did a commendable job presenting the inhumane treatment of 600 men, but those 600 men were not the only Confederates mistreated, tortured, starved, beaten and murdered. Neither did the motive for their barbaric treatment have anything to do with the conditions in Southern POW camps where the inmates and their warders ate the same food and lived under much the same conditions. This book is a good start in revealing the facts concerning the treatment of Confederate POWs in the War of Secession, but it is only a start. There is so much to UN-learn about that period in history before most people will be able even to BELIEVE books like this.

I found myself unable to put this book down. The well written first hand entries from those poor souls, for all that they endured they remained honorable to a cause which they truly believed to be just. The history of the United States should be rewritten to include the true facts behind the breakdown within the POW camps of both the North and the South. I found it shocking that the treatment of POWs as shields, stravation, exposure and lack of basic humane needs. I would recommend this book to anyone who is in search for the truth. The reader should keep an open mind and not rush to judgement, as much of history (as we were taught) only tales half the story.

Ms. Joslyn's book is full of useful information, with an enormous number of quotes from letters and journals of the terrible treatment of 600 hundred Confederate States military officers. If anyone is interested in and in depth study of the "Immortal Six Hundred," her book should certainly be consulted. It, however, is not a historical account, and is partisan in its presentation. That the 600 hundred were mistreated is without question. However, she generalizes that all Confederate prisoners were mistreated (which may be true, but she doesn't provide the evidence). On the other hand she attempts to show that Union prisoners were well treated, in spite of evidence to the contrary. When she suggests mistreatment of Union Prisoners it wasn't vicious and intentional, it was because the South didn't have the resources, and everyone was suffering. It comes across as a one-sided treatment. What would be interesting is to determine to what extent General Foster had a personal agenda, and what happened was more a reflection of his disposition than a general policy to mistreat prisoners. Ms. Joslyn has to commended for the tremendous amount of work in gathering documents and resource materials. Her bibliography will be a tremendous resource for others interested in writing a history of a sorry episode of a sorry war.