Overview

Toward the end of the American Civil War, the Confederacy faced manpower shortages, and the Confederate Army, following practices the Union had already adopted, began to recruit soldiers from their prison ranks. They targeted foreign-born soldiers whom they thought might not have strong allegiances to the North. Key battalions included the Brooks Battalion, a unit composed entirely of Union soldiers who wished to join the Confederacy and were not formally recruited; Tucker’s Regiment and the 8th Battalion Confederate Infantry recruited mainly among Irish, German, and French immigrants. Though the scholarship on the Civil War is vast, Changing Sides represents the first entry to investigate Union POWs who fought for the Confederacy, filling a significant gap in the historiography of Civil War incarceration. To provide context, Patrick Garrow traces the history of the practice of recruiting troops from enemy POWs, noting the influence of the mostly immigrant San Patricios in the Mexican-American War. The author goes on to describe Confederate prisons, where conditions often provided ample incentive to change sides. Garrow’s original archival research in an array of archival records, along with his archaeological excavation of the Confederate guard camp at Florence, South Carolina, in 2006, provide a wealth of data on the lives of these POWs, not only as they experienced imprisonment and being “galvanized” to the other side, but also what happened to them after the war was over.

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9781621906179

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Changing Sidesis a study of several thousand Union prisoners of war who agreed to change sides and join the Confederate Army in the final months of the Civil War. Patrick Garrow also examines the motivationof Confederate officials who tried to recruit Union prisoners of war, characterizing the activity as a desperate act to fill the depleted ranks of Southern armies.Changing Sidesis a well-researched book that utilizes a variety of published andunpublished primary sources to examine a neglected topic. --The North Carolina Historical Review

Author Information

PATRICK GARROW is a professional archaeologist whose career spanned more than 50 years. He has authored or edited numerous site reports and monographs, including The Chieftains Excavations, 1969-1971. His scholarship has appeared in American Antiquity and numerous other peer-reviewed journals and books.

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