In 1863, the Confederacy was compelled to relocate the concentration of prisoners of war in Richmond to a less vulnerable site. Not only was the importation of supplies for the prisoners taxing an overburdened transportation system, but the Richmond government needed every available soldier at the front and could not spare troops to guard the prisoners.
It was necessary, therefore, to move the Northern prisoners far into the interior, and the Confederate Secretary of War ordered Wapt. W. Sidney Winder to Georgia to find a suitable place for a camp. After meeting some local resistance, Winder (later commandant of the prison) selected a site in Sumter County north of Americus, in southwestern Georgia. Captain Richard B. Winder (Sidney's cousin) was appointed quartermaster, with orders to build a stockade and arrange for maintenance.
Five hundred prisoners arrived at Andersonville in February 1864, the first of 32,000 men to be imprisoned there before the camp was closed by Federal forces in April 1865. Most of the prisoners suffered greatly--and 13,000 of them died--because of poor organization, meager supplies, the Federal government's refusal to exchange prisoners, and often the cruelty of men and a government engaged in a losing battle for survival.
Why was this squalor, mismanagement, and waste allowed at Andersonville? Looking for an answer, Ovid Futch cut through charges and countercharges that have made the camp a subject of bitter controversy. He examined diaries and first-hand accounts of prisoners, guards, and officers, and both Confederate and Federal government records (including the transcript of the trial of Capt. Henry Wirz, the alleged "fiend of Andersonville"). Having sifted the evidence, Futch has determined the conditions that existed at Andersonville, how they were dealt with, and who was responsible.

Historians have broadened the somewhat simplistic interpretation of the Civil War as a battle between the North and the South by revealing the "many Souths" that made up the Confederacy, but the "North" has remained largely undifferentiated as a geopolitical term. In this welcome collection, seven Civil War scholars offer a unique regional perspective on the Civil War by examining how a specific group of Northerners- Midwesterners, known as Westerners and Middle Westerners during the 1860s-experienced the war on the home front-experienced the war on the home front. From the exploitation of Confederate prisoners in Ohio to wartime college enrollment in Michigan, these essays reveal how Midwestern men, women, families, and communities became engaged in myriad war-related activities and support. Agriculture figures prominently in the collection, with several contributors exploring the agricultural power of the region and the impact of the war on farming, farm families, and farm women. Contributors also consider student debates and reactions to questions of patriotism, the effect of the war on military families' relationships, issues of women's loyalty and deference to male authority, as well as the treatment of political dissent and dissenters. Bringing together an assortment of home front topics from a variety of fresh perspectives, this collection offers a view of the Civil War that is unabashedly Midwestern.

The "deadlines" were boundaries prisoners had to stay within or risk being shot. Just as a prisoner would take the daring challenge in "crossing the deadline" to attempt escape, Crossing the Deadlines crosses those boundaries of old scholarship by taking on bold initiatives with new methodologies, filling a void in the current scholarship of Civil War prison historiography, which usually does not go beyond discussing policy, prison history and environmental and social themes. Due to its eclectic mix of contributors-from academic and public historians to anthropologists currently excavating at specific stockade sites-the collection appeals to a variety of scholarly and popular audiences. Readers will discover how the Civil War incarceration narrative has advanced to include environmental, cultural, social, religious, retaliatory, racial, archaeological, and memory approaches. As the historiography of Civil War captivity continues to evolve, readers of Crossing the Deadlines will discover elaboration on themes that emerged in William Hesseltine's classic collection, Civil War Prisons, as well as interconnections with more recent interdisciplinary scholarship. Rather than being dominated by policy analysis, this collection examines the latest trends, methodologies, and multidisciplinary approaches in Civil War carceral studies. Unlike its predecessor, which took a micro approach on individual prisons and personal accounts, Crossing the Deadlines is a compilation of important themes that are interwoven on broader scale by investigating many prisons North and South. Although race played a major role in the war, its study has not been widely integrated into the prison narrative; a portion of this collection is dedicated to the role of African Americans as both prisoners and guards and to the slave culture and perceptions of race that perpetuated in prisons. Trends in environmental, societal, and cultural implications related to prisons are investigated as well as the latest finds at prison excavation sites, including the challenges and triumphs in awakening Civil War prisons' memory at historical sites.