Part 2:
Michael Gray, who edited this new book, opens the volume with a historiography of Civil War prisons. Before 1930, while there was a post-war stream of memoirs on the Civil War prisons, there really was a lack of scholarship on the subject. That changed with the publication that year of William Hesseltine's Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology. Gray writes that the book, published in 1930, is "a trailblazing analysis that has had a lasting impact for scholars. The book is a balanced argument, based on impartial sources, that maintains neither the North nor the South purposely maltreated its captives; rather, each side was unprepared for them, while imprisoned soldiers were further doomed by the reliance on an irreconcilable exchange system. Moreover, a “war psychosis” developed on home fronts, spurred by propaganda, thereby increasing tensions and, consequently, retribution. Hesseltine’s book not only ushered the first scholarly treatment of prisons by a trained historian, but it also followed a quagmire of biased work from the Civil War generation, battling in blame. Shoddy research and writing continued well into the new century, made worse by fictionalized accounts. Civil War Prisons, on the other hand, was considered by many to be the first analysis to set the historical record straight on prisons..."
The publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville by Mackinlay Kantor pushed Hesseltine three decades later to step back into the public arena to argue for scholarship over polemnic in examining Civil War prisons. Hesseltine wrote that Kantor's novel was "uninfluenced by any critical scholarship…. It has excessive length, excessive exposition of the unimportant fornifications of uninteresting people, and an excessive cast of conventional characters. In all of this, the author is perpetuating the myth of Andersonville, capitalizing on the official propaganda and proceeding without benefit of scholarship.”
The novel stirred Hesseltine to battle and it increased his potential readership by expanding public awareness of the forgotten Union and Confederate prisons. It also prompted him to put together the essays that became "Civil War Prisons."