Prison Life Among the Rebels

Union Army chaplain Henry S. White was shuffled among Confederate prisons from May to September 1864. After his release, he descibed his experiences in 18 letters, published in Zion's Herald , a Methodist newspaper in New England. White's anti-Southern biases are an integral part of the account. He tells his Northern audience that his captors are godless tyrants, that they steal from the POWs and that their armies have only the loosest kind of discipline. Confederate currency is "bogus," Southern women are "saucy," and "impudent" children yell out, "O, see the blue bellies." Yet he also recalls lively political debates between captives and guards, musing that it may not have been prudent to argue with "men who were full of fire and armed to the teeth." Also related are the horrors of incarceration: inadequate water supplies, constant battle with vermin, obsession with the scarce rations. Jervey is professor of history at Radford University in Virginia.