POW essays

POW essays In a striking study of life at Union POW camps during the Civil War, Philip Burnham creates little doubt that the Union was as brutal as the Confederacy. Burnham uses the collection of memoirs made by two separate Confederate prisoners held captive in northern camps to illustrate the harsh conditions that existed during the span of the war. Anthony M. Keiley provides a bulk of the inside information used by Philip Burnham. Keiley, a lawyer and newspaper editor prior to the war provides well written analyses of the camps in the northern states. Keiley creates a few relationships with the higher-ups at his internment camp, which ensured that his treatment was a little nicer than some of the others in at Elmira prison. With a slightly contrasting view, another prisoners outlook on the camps comes from one who did not in anyway attempt to get on the good side of his captors. The man that provided this view was John King of the 25th Virginia Infantry. Both Keiley and King provide the details of lifestyles in the camps. With information given from people that were receiving first-hand experience, the sources are very reliable. Burnham relays the descriptions of how the men were tortured, what the rations were like, and how the prisoners passed the time. They stood motionless and gazed into one anothers haggard faces with despairing eyes. There was no need to talk, as all topics of conversation had long since been exhausted. (52) With so much time and so little to do, the men resorted to nothing. A sad truth that compels the reader to understand the torturous affect this environment had on its inhabitants. Perhaps one the most recognized camps during the Civil War is the camp in Andersonville, Georgia. The accounts of prisoners held at Andersonville make one of the strongest implications that this was a war that was not so civil. The history of the prisoners at Andersonville is so bleak that the...