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[ Male Narrator ] Civil War soldiers captured by the enemy often found
themselves in situations more parlous than the battlefield.
The prison camps of both sides were inadequate to house the large
numbers of prisoners confined in them. Overcrowded and unsanitary, they
were breeding grounds of disease. Many men who came in as healthy
prisoners died from illnesses or malnutrition before they could
be exchanged or released. In the first years of the war,
prisoners were frequently exchanged. There were negotiated rates of so
many privates swapped for an officer, so many officers of lower rank for
officers of higher rank, and so on. Men captured in 1861 or 1862
might spend only a few months as guests of the other side.
On occasions when large numbers of men were captured at once, the
victors could opt to parole them. In these cases the surrendered troops
were enrolled as prisoners then released on their oath or parole not to
fight again until officially exchanged. This was the case with the
third Minnesota capture at Murfreeboro, Tennessee in 1862.
They were assigned to duty on the frontier and fought the Dakota until
they were exchanged the following year. This arrangement relieved the captors
of burden of transporting and feeding a large number of captives. Under the
exchange in parole system, neither side went to great lengths to adequately
house of feed their temporary prisoners. As the scope of the conflict increased,
and with it the number of prisoners. The entire process slowed down,
worsening the conditions for POW's. In 1864 the exchange system broke
down entirely. Union leaders felt the exchange of prisoners benefitted the
Confederacy far more than the North. And some Union generals believed
that rebelled troops had broken their parole on a number of occasions
and returned to combat. So prisoner swamps nearly stopped.
Prison camps in the North soon began to experience severe overcrowding
and disease but conditions in the South were very much worse.
At this time, most Confederate prisons were little more or than open pens
where the problems of disease were aggravated by exposure and starvation.
With increasing numbers of unexchanged Yankee prisoners, these sites became
death traps. The most notorious of these camps was Andersonville Prison,
officially known as Camp Sumter, in Sumter County, Georgia, in the
southwestern part of that state. Here are tens of thousands
Confederate prisoners were held in an open area covering 16 acres.
Between February 1864 and March 1865, some 45,000 prisoners passed
through Andersonville and more than 12,000 of them died there.
A number of Minnesotan soldiers were prisoners of war in
Andersonville and quite a few of them did not survive the experience.
The collections of the Minnesota Historical Society include accounts of
survivors and some letters and diaries of men who did not make it but were
remembered by their comments. The stories of these soldiers often
recount human ingenuity and determination the in face of crushing
hardships and unreason cruelty. They are little told tales from
the dark side of the Civil War.