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Every Civil War veteran had a story to tell. But few stories top the one lived by Wright Stephen Batchelor. Like most North Carolina farmers, Batchelor eschewed slaveholding. He also opposed secession and war, yet he fought on both sides of the conflict. During his time in each uniform, Batchelor barely avoided death at the Battle of Gettysburg, was captured twice, and survived one of the war's most infamous prisoner-of-war camps. He escaped and, after walking hundreds of miles, rejoined his comrades at Petersburg, Virginia, just as the Union siege there began. Once the war ended, Batchelor returned on foot to his farm, where he took part in local politics, supported rights for freedmen, and was fatally involved in a bizarre hometown murder. Michael K. Brantley's story of his great-great-grandfather's odyssey blends memory and Civil War history to look at how the complexities of loyalty and personal belief governed one man's actions-and still influence the ways Americans think about the conflict today.

The deal, which includes the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian oil funds, comes soon after the one-year anniversary of the Mahsa Amini protests.

Soon after the close of military operations in the American Civil War, another war began over how it would be remembered by future generations. The prisoner-of-war issue has figured prominently in Northern and Southern writing about the conflict. Northerners used tales of Andersonville to demonize the Confederacy, while Southerners vilified Northern prison policies to show the depths to which Yankees had sunk to attain victory. Over the years the postwar Northern portrayal of Andersonville as fiendishly designed to kill prisoners in mass quantities has largely been dismissed. The Lost Cause characterization of Union prison policies as criminally negligent and inhumane, however, has shown remarkable durability. Northern officials have been portrayed as turning their military prisons into concentration camps where Southern prisoners were poorly fed, clothed, and sheltered, resulting in inexcusably high numbers of deaths. Andersonvilles of the North, by James M. Gillispie, represents the first broad study to argue that the image of Union prison officials as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. This study is not an attempt to “whitewash” Union prison policies or make light of Confederate prisoner mortality. But once the careful reader disregards unreliable postwar polemics, and focuses exclusively on the more reliable wartime records and documents from both Northern and Southern sources, then a much different, less negative, picture of Northern prison life emerges. While life in Northern prisons was difficult and potentially deadly, no evidence exists of a conspiracy to neglect or mistreat Southern captives. Confederate prisoners’ suffering and death were due to a number of factors, but it would seem that Yankee apathy and malice were rarely among them. In fact, likely the most significant single factor in Confederate (and all) prisoner mortality during the Civil War was the halting of the prisoner exchange cartel in the late spring of 1863. Though Northern officials have long been condemned for coldly calculating that doing so aided their war effort, the evidence convincingly suggests that the South’s staunch refusal to exchange black Union prisoners was actually the key sticking point in negotiations to resume exchanges from mid-1863 to 1865. Ultimately Gillispie concludes that Northern prisoner-of-war policies were far more humane and reasonable than generally depicted. His careful analysis will be welcomed by historians of the Civil War, the South, and of American history.

During the winter of 1864, more than 3,000 Federal prisoners of war escaped from Confederate prison camps into South Carolina and North Carolina, often with the aid of local slaves. Their flight created, in the words of contemporary observers, a \"Yankee plague,\" heralding a grim end to the Confederate cause. In this fascinating look at Union soldiers' flight for freedom in the last months of the Civil War, Lorien Foote reveals new connections between the collapse of the Confederate prison system, the large-scale escape of Union soldiers, and the full unraveling of the Confederate States of America. By this point in the war, the Confederacy was reeling from prison overpopulation, a crumbling military, violence from internal enemies, and slavery's breakdown. The fugitive Federals moving across the countryside in mass numbers, Foote argues, accelerated the collapse as slaves and deserters decided the presence of these men presented an opportune moment for escalated resistance.Blending rich analysis with an engaging narrative, Foote uses these ragged Union escapees as a lens with which to assess the dying Confederate States, providing a new window into the South's ultimate defeat.

In 1861, Lt. Col. William Hoffman was appointed to the post of commissary general of prisoners and urged to find a suitable site for the construction of what was expected to be the Union's sole military prison. After inspecting four islands in Lake Erie, Hoffman came upon one in Sandusky Bay known as Johnson's Island. With a large amount of fallen timber, forty acres of cleared land, and its proximity to Sandusky, Ohio, Johnson's Island seemed the ideal location for the Union's purpose. By the following spring, Johnson's Island prison was born.Johnson's Island tells the story of the camp from its planning stages until the end of the war. Because the facility housed only officers, several literate diary keepers were on hand; author Roger Pickenpaugh draws on their accounts, along with prison records, to provide a fascinating depiction of day-to-day life. Hunger, boredom, harsh conditions, and few luxuries were all the prisoners knew until the end of the war, when at last parts of Johnson's Island were auctioned off, the post was ordered abandoned, and the island was mustered out of service.There has not been a book dedicated to Johnson's Island since 1965. Roger Pickenpaugh presents an eloquent and knowledgeable overview of a prison that played a tremendous role in the lives of countless soldiers. It is a book sure to interest Civil War buffs and scholars alike.

Discusses an important yet often misunderstood topic in American History Camp Chase was a major Union POW camp and also served at various times as a Union military training facility and as quarters for Union soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Confederacy and released on parole or exchanged. As such, this careful, thorough, and objective examination of the history and administration of the camp will be of true significance in the literature on the Civil War.

The War Criminal's Sonbrings to life hidden aspects of the Civil War through the sweeping saga of the firstborn son in the infamous Confederate Winder family, who shattered family ties to stand with the Union. Gen. John H. Winder was the commandant of most prison camps in the Confederacy, including Andersonville. When Winder gave his son William Andrew Winder the order to come south and fight, desert, or commit suicide, William went to the White House and swore his allegiance to President Lincoln and the Union. Despite his pleas to remain at the front,it was not enough.Winder was ordered to command Alcatraz, a fortress that became a Civil War prison, where he treated his prisoners humanely despite repeated accusations of disloyalty and treason because the Winder name had become shorthand for brutality during an already brutal war. John Winder died before he could be brought to justice as a war criminal. Haunted by his father's villainy, William went into a self-imposed exile for twenty years and eventually ended up at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, to fulfill his longstanding desire to better the lot of Native Americans. InThe War Criminal's SonJane Singer evokes the universal themes of loyalty, shame, and redemption in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

666 days of diary entries documenting the life of a Union officer held in Confederate prisons Captured on October 11, 1863, James Riley Weaver, a Union cavalry officer, spent nearly seventeen months in Confederate prisons. Remarkably, Weaver kept a diary that documents 666 consecutive days of his experience, including not only his life in a series of prisons throughout the South, but his precaptivity cavalry duties, and his eventual return to civilian life. It is an unparalleled eyewitness account of a crucial part of our history. Weaver's observations never veer into romanticized descriptions; instead, he describes the \"little world\" inside each prison and outdoor camp, describing men drawn from \"every class of society, high and low, righ and poor, from every country and clime.\" In addition, Weaver records details about life in the Confederacy that he gleans from visitors, guards, new arrivals, recaptured escapees, Southern newspapers, and even glimpses through windows. As the editors demonstrate, Weaver's diary-keeping provided an outlet for expressing suppressed emotions, ruminating on a seemingly endless confinement that tested his patriotism, religious faith, and will to survive. In the process, he provides not only historically important information but also keen insights into the human condition under adversity.

It was truly amazing to see the joy and celebration surrounding the release of three Israeli hostages, who were released in January as part of a prisoner exchange/ceasefire agreement. They appeared to be well-fed and in good condition, though Kuttab is sure the psychological scars of their captivity will be with them for a long time. But what of the Palestinian prisoners? Ninety of them, all women and children, were released the same day. But many did not see them in mainstream media outlets or know of their ordeals and the agony they experienced, nor did they witness the celebrations of their families. In fact, Israel prohibited any public celebrations or expressions of joy to be made within its borders for their release. The police even visited the East Jerusalem families of released prisoners specifically to remind them of this law. The Israeli narrative is that Palestinian prisoners are \"terrorists and hardened Hamas criminals\" who will probably just be hunted down and rearrested or assassinated once Israel gets back all of its hostages--as some Israeli officials have declared in the Hebrew news media.

One year into the Israel U.S. genocidal war on Gaza, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in combat in Tal al Sultan in Rafah. For Palestini ans (and Arabs generally), he was a man of principle, who spoke clearly and defiantly as he affirmed the right of Palestinians to live free of Israeli domination. Unlike other leaders on a national scale--most recently Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, among many others--he was not assassinated but rather died in combat, an end for which he had expressed a preference. He commanded the militias that roared out of Gaza on Oct. 7, broke through the structure meant to encage them, neutralized Israel's southern command, captured prisoners of war and took them to Gaza, to use them as bar gaining chips to end the siege on Gaza and to release Palestinians in Israeli prisons. That turned out to be the opening salvo in the Palestinian war of liberation.