I beg to differ. CS prisoners suffered greatly while imprisoned due to hunger, improper sanitation, lack of adequate clothing and shelter and lack of medical care. There was a huge difference and there is no way of getting around it. The southerners could not even feed their own scarecrow soldiers in the field whereas the union army was fed extremely well. The withholding of food, clothing, medical care, etc in federal prisons was nothing short of criminal and despicable.
My GGGrandfather, 1st Sgt Andrew Jackson Corell, 45th VA Inf was captured at 3rd Winchester in Sept 1864 and sent to the hell hole known as Pt Lookout, MD. When he was finally released after the war, he walked home and his stories of his time in prison was unbelievable. Many of his friends did not survive their time at Pt Lookout. He said they had very little to eat and suffered greatly for no good reason. He also said that many more would have died had it not been for a group of Catholic nuns who came and gave them blankets and other supplies while they were there. When he finally arrived home after having walked from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay to the mountains of SW Virginia he refused to come inside the house as his clothes were so full of vermin. He still wore his uniform that he was wearing when he was captured and he made a small fire in the yard where he burned his uniform before coming in the house. This is no myth.
It's a myth.
"Postwar writing done about the Civil War's prisons should almost never be taken at face value as reliable primary source evidence. Both Northerners and Southerners in the half-century or so following the war exploited this issue for personal, political, and social reasons. Rarely does one find a postwar narrative, whether it be about Andersonville or Rock Island, that reads like a dispassionate attempt to accurately portray what life was like as a prisoner during the Civil War. The overwhelming majority, from both regions, are virulent polemics that often conflict with wartime records and diaries." [James M. Gillespie,
Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners, p. 3]
My friend, Jim Epperson, who is a professional mathematician [formerly a math professor, now edits a mathematics journal], came up with some numbers he posted on USENET some time back:
[begin quote]
Numbers like this can be disputed, of course, but these are all
taken from a serious, reputable source (E.B. Long's CIVIL WAR DAY BY DAY).
Estimated US army size (total): 2,000,000
Estimated CS army size (total): 750,000
The estimates for CS army size are very elastic. Figures run as high as 1.5 million, and as low as 600,000.
Now, let's look at non-battlefield deaths, those from disease, accidents, etc.
Federal non-battlefield deaths: 219,930
CSA non-battlefield deaths: 164,000 (estimate)
Non-battle death rate for Federal troops = 11.0%
Non-battle death rate for Confederates = 21.9%
[end quote]
Here are some figures I came up with:
At Chimborazo, a confederate hospital, there were 23,849 cases of illness. Of these, 2,717 died. That's a death rate of 11.39% of those who were ill. 88.61% of the ill patients recovered.
[Source: Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Vol I, Part 3, pages 30 and 46]
The death rates for the major Northern prison camps are:
Alton 11.8%
Camp Chase 8.7%
Camp Douglas 12.4%
Camp Morton 10%
Fort Delaware 7.6%
Johnson's Island 2.7%
Point Lookout 5.6%
Rock Island 15.8%
Elmira 24.3%
The average death rate in Union prisons was 11.7% while the average in confederate prisons was about 15.3%
[Averages calculated by Michael Horigan in his book,
Elmira: Death Camp of the North, pages 180 and 222]
So a confederate soldier was only marginally safer under the care of his own physicians than he was in a Federal prison camp, and a confederate soldier was safer as a prisoner of the Federals than he was as a soldier in the field.
Bringing the