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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Charles W. Sanders, Jr. While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War. (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 390. $44.95.
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| The historiography of the American Civil War has varied since the end of the conflict. From the self-serving autobiographies of the nineteenth century to critical analysis in the twentieth, historians have covered the conflict in detail. Few undiscovered areas of the war remain for rigorous academic studies. Charles W. Sanders, Jr., has discovered one of the lightly researched areas and presents an excellent and disturbing picture of an often ignored, but crucial, facet of the conflict. |
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Sanders articulate his thesis clearly and adroitly, blaming equally the Federal and Confederate governments for the misery and death that has become the legacy of the war's military prison system. For the Federals, issues over political recognition of the Confederacy, internal dissention over punishing prisoners for disloyalty, and, the later decision to end the parole system all played a part in the deaths of thousands of prisoners under their control. While some of the Confederates' issues duplicated those of the Union, the added problems of caring for tens of thousands of unplanned and unwanted prisoners of war in an economy that was rapidly collapsing added to the death toll. |
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