At Camp Chase, four miles west of Columbus, Ohio: "Those once proud Southerners who had been victorious in many a battle kicked and cuffed, starving and sick at heart, and in despair with no hope, sitting, waiting for the scraps from the hospital to be washed to their feet with the garbage and excrement all clumped in the same ditch together."

Milton Asbury Ryan, Captain, Company G, 8th Mississippi Regiment, CSA

Until recent years, history has not been open to the brutal deprivation suffered by Confederate prisoners in Yankee prison camps. It's a story begging to be told about the numerous Civil War POW camps spread across the far reaches of the North. Places like Point Lookout, Md.; Johnson's Island, northern Ohio; Camp Douglas, Chicago; and Elmira, N.Y., whose nightmarish conditions earned it the name "Hellmira."

In his book, "So Far From Dixie: Confederates in Yankee Prisons," Phillip Burnham paints a macabre scene of a mixture of events from the War Between the States, stirring together a mess of humanity in the boiling cauldrons of Southern battlefields and Northern prison camps. His sources of eyewitness information remain alive through documents left by five men who experienced firsthand the horrors of being Northern POWs.

Oddly enough, one of those five prisoners was a Union soldier, Frank Wilkeson. A Union Army volunteer, only 16 years old at the time, Wilkeson saw the worst kinds of criminals released from Northern jails and transported south under guard for conscription into the Union Army.

Berry Benson, one of the men Burnham discovered in his research, focused all his energy on escaping from the New York hellhole, Elmira, variously called "Hellmira" and "Andersonville on ice." Constantly digging tunnels with other prisoners, Benson felt a dire urgency to gain his freedom, after having been transferred from other camps to Elmira.

Anthony Keiley of Petersburg, Va., the better educated of the prisoners, was a glib-tongue lawyer-politician who talked prison officials into giving him a job that he enjoyed, logging prisoners into Elmira. Later, he had to start logging them out, up to 20 or 30 dead in a day. After the war, and always the politician, Keiley became mayor of Richmond.

In one of his prison observations, Keiley wrote: "The Northern people, and I speak from long acquaintance with them, care much less for Negroes than we. ... It is the free states that have made the most odiously discriminating laws against the Negroes as have characterized Chicago and New York." Keiley referred to one of the other unheralded chapters in American History, the "Black Codes" that existed in all the antebellum Northern states. Black Codes were laws far more restrictive and oppressive for blacks than the "Jim Crow" laws, imposed much later in the South. Among the states with the worst Black Codes were Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Another prisoner at Elmira was John King, a skilled craftsman who refused to build coffins for his fellow prisoners. And Marcus Toney of Tennessee refused to take the Union oath of loyalty to gain his freedom, nor would he take it until many years after the war's end.

Toney described basic survival at Elmira: "On account of the waste from the commissary a great many rodents from Elmira [the city] ran into the prison. As there were not many holes in which they could hide it was an easy catch for the boys by knocking them over with sticks…. As there was very little currency in prison, tobacco, rats, pickles, pork, and lightbread were mediums of exchange. Five chews of tobacco would buy a rat; a rat would buy five chews of tobacco; a loaf of bread would buy a rat; a rat would buy a loaf of bread, and so on…."

Little thought has been given in history to the fate of Southern prisoners held in the north. But if lessons in morality are to be taught, it's that the South was starving due to the pillaging and destruction wrought by the marauding hordes of William T. Sherman in Georgia and Phillip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. With scarcely any food to feed Southern armies and civilians, almost nothing was available for prisoners.

By contrast, in locales such as Elmira, food and medicine was plentiful to the Union Army. Still, Confederate prisoners were subjected to starvation and death by diseases for which medicine was purposely withheld. A unique method of thinning out the prison population was to place inmates with smallpox in barracks or tents with "well" prisoners. Malnourishment, exposure to extreme heat in the summer, extreme cold in the winter, and water contaminated with sewage helped take its toll.

At Camp Douglas, in particular, prisoners had to wear lightweight clothes, even during the biting Chicago winters, to reduce escape attempts. Many Confederate prisoners froze to death.

Union prisons also became sources of entertainment. Enterprising businessmen built tall wooden towers near the prison fences. They charged civilians up to 10 cents a head to climb up and watch prisoners in the stockades, on display like animals in a zoo.

The bathroom facilities often were no more than latrines - trenches out in the open. Everything was sport for the spectators. This kind of unseemly entertainment was available for Northerners at Camp Douglas and Elmira.

But perhaps one of the most villainous individuals at the prison was a Union Army doctor, Major Eugene Francis Sanger, the hospital chief and a "brute" in Keiley's estimation. By some accounts, Sanger failed to provide even minimum attention to those under his care, and some of his activities rivaled those of Josef Mengele during a later war.

Keiley wrote that Sanger's "systematic inhumanity to the sick" was apparently a response to the rumors of alleged Andersonville atrocities. "I do not doubt that many of those who died at Elmira perished from actual starvation," reflected Keiley with bitter irony, who believed himself to be "in a country where food was cheap and abundant." By any stretch of imagination, had the South won the war, Union Army medical officers at Elmira and at Camp Douglas would likely have been charged with war crimes.

Bill Ward lives in Salisbury and is a historian, writer, and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Contact him at wardwriters@bellsouth.net