Immortal Captives: The Story of Confederate Officers and the United States Prisoner of War Policy

"Some of the boys had no blankets, and we all slept on bare boards. It was so cold that the boys who had no blankets had to walk all night to keep from freezing . . . It seems to me that I can hear those poor fellows yet-walking, walking up and down on that brick floor."
-Maj. David B. Coulter, Twelfth Arkansas Infantry

"Immortal Captives grounds itself heavily in meticulous and thorough research."
--The Midwest Book Review

Through the private letters, written testimonies, and journal entries of hundreds of Confederate officers, Mauriel Phillips Joslyn provides a moving and heartbreaking account of the six hundred Confederate soldiers who suffered in Union custody. After Lincoln and his war council dissolved the prisoner exchange program in 1864, the North used captured officers from all states in the seceded South to set an example to the remaining Confederacy.

Malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies took a terrible toll, and the officers, who were denied medical care, slowly starved during the hard winter months. After a rumor that Yankee soldiers were shot by their own army, the Union deliberately placed fifty Confederate prisoners in a stockade at Charleston Harbor. Forced under the artillery fire of their own comrades, these Southern heroes suffered mercilessly and unjustly in Northern hands. The last of the surviving six hundred Confederate officers were not released until several months after the end of the Civil War.