Civil War Prisons: a Study in War Psychology

Upon its publication in 1930, Civil War Prisons immediately provoked controversy. The first authoritative study of both Southern and Northern wartime prison systems, the book exposed several myths, including the widely held assumption that Confederate leaders conspired to kill their prisoners through deliberate neglect. William Best Hesseltine demonstrated that the North shared responsibility with the South for the poor treatment of prisoners, and that it had little to brag about in its own camps. Furthermore, Hesseltine argued that some in the North had conducted a propaganda campaign aimed at impugning the "southern character, " thus creating what he called a wartime "psychosis" that made it easier for the Union to believe the worst of the Confederacy.