Immortal Captives: The Story of 600 Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy
By Mauriel Phillips Joslyn
(September 2008 Civil War News)

Illustrated, maps, notes, bibliography appendices, index, 344 pp. 2008. Pelican Publishing Co., 1000 Burmaster St., Gretna, LA 70053, $19.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Jay Jorgensen
Jay Jorgensen is an attorney and municipal court judge in New Jersey. He is the author of Gettysburg's Bloody Wheatfield and The Wheatfield at Gettysburg: A Walking Tour. He also received his Master’s Degree in Military History - Civil War Studies from American Military University.

Review:
One of the most contentious issues between the Confederate and Federal governments concerned prisoners of war. Each side accused the other of intentionally mistreating captured soldiers.

Within a decade or so after the war, the issue had pretty much dropped off the list of concerns of Northerners. In the South, however, it was another story. White Southerners resented accusations that they had mistreated captured Yankees, and they developed an elaborate argument that the Lincoln government had deliberately abused captured Confederates.

Any suffering by captive Yankees, they argued, had resulted from the inability of the Confederacy even to care for its own people. The North, so the argument went, had ample resources to provide humane treatment for captured Rebels.

The argument became part of the long-standing mythology with which the white postwar South enshrouded its interpretation of the war.

One of the major exhibits in the mythology concerned the “Immortal 600.” In the summer of 1864 word circulated in the North that the Confederates had placed captured Federals in Charleston, S.C., where they would be under fire from Union guns shelling the city.

In retaliation, the Yankees selected 600 captured Confederates (actually 598 officers and two enlisted men) and sent them to Morris Island off the coast at Charleston. There they were held in a position where they were exposed to fire from Rebel guns. Later the captives were sent to Fort Pulaski, near Savannah, and in March 1865 to Fort Delaware where they had originally been imprisoned.

All though this time the 600 had been fed scanty rations, denied adequate clothing and blankets, and frequently been exposed to harsh weather. Most had suffered from various diseases, especially scurvy, and 41 had died. Three others died soon after their release at the end of the war.

 Mauriel Joslyn has presented two studies in this work. One indicts the Union government for its inhumane treatment of prisoners of war — in effect, repeating the original Confederate argument. The other presents, usually in their own words, an account of the experiences of the 600.

The book will be of value to those with an interest in Civil War prisons. The work’s major shortcoming lies in Joslyn’s failure to update a work originally published a dozen years earlier. Thus she does not take into account such recent studies as Charles W. Sanders Jr.’s While in the Hands of the Enemy. It seems that both sides adopted a policy of deliberately mistreating prisoners.

Even if Joslyn rejects the new findings, she owes it to her readers at least to alert them to what more recent students of the subject found in their research.