I'm John Batcher talking with Professor Brandage of his new book of Fate Worse and Hell, which is

POWs in the Civil War, but it influences decisions made long after the Civil War about the

proper conduct of an army towards its captured adversaries. We need to introduce here that the

union was stringing camps together before they stopped the exchanges

all through the country, New York, to Illinois, to Wisconsin, smaller camps, and they were

organized around places to come in out of the weather. The Confederate camps didn't necessarily emphasize

that. We have two different climates. But there was a vague understanding of the proper treatment

of prisoners. You've got to feed them. You've got to care for their needs if they're wounded.

At the same time, there was Military Order No. 100 that became a guide for the proper conduct

of warfare and also rules, if you violated them, you could be prosecuted from them.

What do we need to know about France Lieber and especially the POWs professor?

Well, French's Lieber was a German American, by that point,

German American intellectual, who was very a legal specialist, who was very well integrated

into the transatlantic legal culture.

And I mention that now because that's important to why the so-called Libre Code that he wrote for the Lincoln administration in 1863 had such importance internationally.

But early in the war, the Union Army began to confront all sorts of challenges. One of the challenges is how to decide who is a combatant in a civil war, and especially when

the Confederacy had created various partisan units, guerrilla units, and given them various

authority and whether or not the union had to recognize those groups as legal combatants,

there were the challenges of figuring out how the Union Army should act as it was occupying

more and more of the Confederacy.

Because while the Union Army wasn't doing very well in the East, the Union Army consistently was doing well in the West

and was progressively rolling up the Confederacy starting in 1862 in the West.

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