Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy

Pickenpaugh announces on the first page of Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy that the Confederates took a "makeshift approach" to the prisoners captured at the battle of Big Bethel (p. 1). At appropriate intervals in the book, Pickenpaugh interpolates sections on prison life, mining letters, diaries, and reminiscences to provide local color and to describe conditions within each prison-what prisoners ate, their relationships with guards, and their efforts, fanciful or successful, to escape.