Changing Sides: Union Prisoners of War Who Joined the Confederate Army

Though the scholarship on the Civil War is vast, 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 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.