New Book About Civil War Prisons

"It is hard to look at the most terrible pictures of captives ultimately returned to the North without seeing in one's mind the photographs of those liberated from Nazi concentration camps eight decades later."

Union prisoner of war

The above excerpt is from a new book by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, titled A Fate Worse Than Hell: American Prisoners of the Civil War. Release date is February 28, 2026. "The Atlantic" magazine has an excellent review here.

One of the interesting aspects of the narrative is that the horrors of Civil War prison administration (or lack thereof) led to changes being made that carried forward in history, including "the first systematic codification of the rules of war." Discussing the post-war trial of Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville portrayed in my novel The Edge of Hell, "The Atlantic" writer observes, "Wirz's trial represented the origin of modern prosecution of war crimes."