Camp Ford’s Civil War: Captivity, Community, and Nature in the Dark Corner of the Confederacy

Camp Ford’s Civil War tells the story of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians, enslaved people and refugees, and the natural world around them during the Civil War. The focal point is a ten-acre piece of land where nearly 5,000 Union prisoners of war sat out of battle while fighting their own distinctive kind of war. The narrative also explains the conflict in the wider southern Trans-Mississippi theater, a place that remains in the historical and historiographical shadow of the Civil War elsewhere. This is a story of what became of the largest prisoner of war camp west of the Mississippi River, but it is also a story about the war in the 200 mile radius around the prison camp – the geographic medium in and through which a remarkably diverse range of human and non-human communities swirled and overlapped to create a fascinating, if understudied, narrative of the Civil War.