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Toward the end of the American Civil War, the Confederacy faced
manpower shortages, and the Confederate Army, following practices
the Union had already adopted, began to recruit soldiers from their
prison ranks. They targeted foreign-born soldiers whom they thought
might not have strong allegiances to the North. Key battalions
included the Brooks Battalion, a unit composed entirely of Union
soldiers who wished to join the Confederacy and were not formally
recruited; Tucker's Regiment and the 8th Battalion Confederate
Infantry recruited mainly among Irish, German, and French
immigrants. Though the scholarship on the Civil War is vast,
Changing Sides 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 San Patricios 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.
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