Booknotes: Yankees in the Hill City

New Arrival:

• Yankees in the Hill City: The Union Prisoner of War Camp in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1862-1865 by Clifton W. Potter, Jr. (McFarland, 2024).

When it comes to Civil War Virginia, the Richmond-area military hospitals and POW facilities naturally dominate the discussion of those topics, but Lynchburg, with its railroad connections and relative isolation from advancing Union armies and cavalry raiders (at least until the latter stages of the war) also proved an ideal location. Indeed, the city was one of the Confederacy's primary hospital centers.

From the description: "With three railroads and a canal passing through the city, Lynchburg, Virginia, was a major hospital center during the Civil War, far from the remote battlefields. A transit camp where Union soldiers remained before being paroled or transferred to another prison opened in June 1862 at the Fair Ground, just outside the city limits. Upon arrival, the sick and wounded were assigned to one of the 32 hospitals regardless of the uniform they wore."

Clifton Potter's Yankees in the Hill City: The Union Prisoner of War Camp in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1862-1865 is a "complete history of this Union POW camp in Lynchburg: the context of its founding, its operations, and its fate after the war." Like other military detention facilities throughout the South, the number of prisoners at Lynchburg quickly exceeded both expectations and capacity, and by June 1862 the prisoner population had already expanded six-fold. At mid-summer there were 5,000 men held there. According to Potter's research, the administrator of the camp, Col. George Gibbs, was exceptionally proficient with making the most of his limited resources. Potter estimates that the death rate there was "roughly 1.56 percent" under Gibbs's watch (pg. 7), a pretty impressive figure that included wounded individuals.

More from the description: "Union POWs who died were buried in the City Cemetery by the local funeral service, which also carefully recorded their personal data. Local ministers daily performed burial services for all soldiers, regardless of their race or the color of their uniforms, and all their expenses were paid by the Confederate government."

The first appendix consists of a register of Union POW deaths at Lynchburg between 1862 and 1865. Record data includes name, unit, date and location of death, detailed burial plot info, and cemetery number. Chapter Five of the book covers the 1864 campaign and battle of Lynchburg, and a corresponding appendix lists Union casualties suffered during those events from May to June 1864. In a cool little detail of the kind I've never encountered before, every source listed in the bibliography has attached commentary discussing its content and significance.

The final chapter covers the camp's post-war history and current state of historical memory attached to it.