The Immortal Six Hundred and the Failure of the Civil War POW Exchange Process

Compounding the devastating tragedy of the Civil War was the failure of the warring parties to consistently maintain a system for the effective exchange of prisoners of war, rather than imprisoning combatants for the duration. This failure added at least 56,000 deaths to those accumulating on the battlefield and caused the untold suffering of many thousands more. This book focuses on 600 Confederate officers, made prisoners of war, who were dispatched to Charleston Harbor to act as human shields, and were subsequently imprisoned elsewhere and deliberately starved nearly to death. These actions were the result of the breakdown of the exchange cartel, as well as the retaliation policies promoted by the Secretary of War and the Lincoln administration.