Rebels at Rock Island, by Benton McAdams

Rebels at Rock Island: The Story of a Civil War Prison, by Benton McAdams
Northern University Illinois Press, 2000
13 pages, plus appendices, notes to pages, bibliography, index and 16 pages of b&w photos

Description
Rebels at Rock Island separates truth from fiction in the story of one of the Union's largest camps for Confederate prisoners. While the testimony of its famous fictional inmate, Ashley Wilkes of Gone With the Wind, has helped to cast Rock Island's reputation as the "Andersonville of the North" McAdams shows that this Illinois prison was considerably more humane than some accounts have suggested.

Rock Island, like other Civil War prisons, was not without poblems, including brutal weather, incompetent guards, and inadequate facilities. Malnutrition, smallpox, and a lack of basic supplies were just some of the hardships prisoners suffered, in part because of the eccentric miserliness of William Hoffman, Union commissary general of prisoners, who focused on financial concerns over human needs.

The conditions at Rock Island were, however, no worse than at other Norther prisons such as Camp Douglas, nor was the prison's mission to be unjustly cruel. McAdams establishes that the Union officers in charge of the camp sought to maintain humane conditions in the face of severe shortages, disease, and a war that raged on longer and with greater hardships than anyone had anticipated.

howing how Rock Island was a microcosm of the political mood of the entire nation, during the Civil WAr, McAdams gives special attention to the prison's political and economic ties to the local community, including controversies between the camp commander and the local Copperhead newspaper editor. Readers interested in the Civil War, prison systems, and Illinois politics will find a fresh and fascinating story in Rebels at Rock Island. Two dozen rare photographs round out the unflinching description of prison life.