I'm John Batchler, continuing with Professor Fitzhue Brundage, his new book, A Fate Worse Than Hell, American Prisons of the Civil War,

the before and after.

Before the summer of 63, the exchanges between the Confederacy and the Union continued,

all sometimes laggardly, but they did continue.

Officers and enlisted men both.

And then a decision was made in the Confederacy, in Richmond, to stop the exchanges or to refuse

to exchange African-American combatants at all.

And the decision was made in the Union that this was not acceptable, that to treat the

African-American soldiers who increasingly were being recruited and enlisted in the Union Army,

to treat them as enslaved people was unacceptable

politically, ethically, and in terms of the military. And so what immediately happened is

an enormous number of soldiers on both sides all of a sudden didn't have a place to go.

And that meant concentration.

We begin with two different stories.

First, the Battle of Gettysburg.

This is July, 1863.

There was resistance across the north now to the war that was causing an enormous number of casualties. And remember, the number

one killer of the soldiers in the Civil War, I believe this is correct, was illness, not bullets.

So we're looking at concentration of troops for the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the West,

where you would die in the camp because you'd get a disease, or worse than that,

you'd get bad food or bad water. Now, all of that is going on as Gettysburg is fought,

and Lee retreating with Lee is a man named Birch, who is eventually transported from the field of Gettysburg to Andersonville.

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