The Collapse of Civil War Prisoner Exchanges: How 1863 Turned a Poor Man's War into a Living Hell of Death Camps and War Crimes

By 1863, the American Civil War had reached a turning point, not just on the battlefield but in the policies that shaped who fought and who died. That year, the system of prisoner exchange between Union and Confederate forces broke down, transforming already grim prison camps into sites of mass death. At the same time, the first military drafts in U.S. history revealed a hard truth: this was increasingly a war fought by the poor while the wealthy found ways to stay home.
 
The Exchange System: Broken in the Middle of the War
 
Early in the war, the Union and Confederacy informally cooperated to exchange captured soldiers. The Dix–Hill Cartel, agreed upon in July 1862, allowed prisoners of equal rank to be exchanged one-for-one and set ratios for enlisted men. This system provided at least a minimal relief valve, preventing long-term imprisonment for most captives.
 
However, the fragile agreement collapsed in the summer of 1863. The trigger was the Confederacy's refusal to treat Black Union soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Instead, Confederate officials declared that African American soldiers, many of them formerly enslaved people, would either be returned to slavery or executed. The Union, under President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, refused to tolerate such terms. The United States could not accept a policy that treated its Black troops as property or criminals.
 
From that point on, the exchanges stopped. Thousands of soldiers, both Union and Confederate, were captured in battle and no longer had any prospect of return unless the war ended. Prisoner-of-war camps ballooned in size. Supplies ran short. Disease spread. Death rates soared.
 
Hell on Both Sides of the Line
 
With the end of exchanges, the number of men confined in makeshift prison camps exploded. Andersonville in Georgia, officially known as Camp Sumter, became the most infamous prison camp. Built to hold 10,000 men, it eventually confined over 45,000. Without proper shelter, food, or sanitation, nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died there.
 
The North had its horrors. Elmira Prison in upstate New York held roughly 12,000 Confederate prisoners in bitter winter conditions. Almost 25% died, mostly from pneumonia, dysentery, and malnutrition. At Camp Douglas in Chicago, a similarly high death toll stemmed from brutal cold, contaminated water, and indifference. Prisoners described living in open tents during snowstorms, drinking from infested ditches, and watching men freeze to death overnight.
 
In the spring of 1862, the city of Madison, Wisconsin found itself briefly swept into the wider horror of the Civil War. Camp Randall, known primarily as a training ground for Union soldiers, suddenly became a makeshift prison for some 1,200 captured Confederates from the surrender at Island No. 10. Ill-prepared for this new role, the camp lacked the infrastructure and medical capacity to care for so many malnourished and injured men.
 
The Wisconsin spring was still bitterly cold, and the prisoners, most of them transported directly from the Deep South, were ill-equipped to survive the climate. Tents leaked, rations were sparse, and disease spread quickly. Within just a few months, nearly 140 prisoners died, their remains buried in a quiet section of Forest Hill Cemetery. Today, that patch of ground is known as Confederate Rest, the northernmost Confederate cemetery in the United States.

The experiment ended almost as quickly as it began.
 
Camp Randall was declared unfit for continued use as a prison, and the surviving prisoners were moved elsewhere. In the decades that followed, the camp's memory faded beneath the construction of a new landmark: the University of Wisconsin's Camp Randall Stadium. Yet the Confederate graves remain, a somber reminder of the war's northern reach.
 
Farther south and later in the war, a very different story unfolded on an island in the Mississippi River. By late 1863, with prisoner exchanges between North and South having broken down, the Union Army sought a more permanent solution for housing thousands of captured Confederate troops. They chose Rock Island, situated between Illinois and Iowa, as the site for a major POW camp.
 
Over the next two years, more than 12,000 Confederate soldiers passed through Rock Island Prison. The camp was designed to be more permanent than places like Camp Randall, with barracks and guard towers, but it still proved inadequate. Harsh Midwestern winters, poor nutrition, and rampant disease claimed the lives of nearly 2,000 prisoners. Many died of smallpox and pneumonia, often buried in frozen ground within sight of the Union arsenal's chimneys.
 
Conditions at Rock Island were harsh, though accounts vary in their descriptions. Some prisoners recalled brutal treatment and near starvation; others remembered acts of compassion by guards and medical staff. What is certain is that hundreds of Union guards also died, mainly from the same diseases that afflicted their captives.
 
The camp eventually closed in July 1865, after the war's end. Today, Rock Island Arsenal remains an active U.S. military installation, but the Confederate cemetery is preserved, its rows of headstones standing quietly beneath the trees.
 
In these camps, the Civil War left physical scars far from the major battlefields. The dead of Camp Randall and Rock Island are not remembered with the grandeur of Gettysburg or Antietam. But their suffering tells a powerful story: of men caught in a system that saw them as numbers, of disease and exposure as everyday as bullets, and of how the collapse of the prisoner exchange in 1863 turned captivity into a slow, anonymous death.
 
The exchange breakdown made conditions worse across the board. Previously, even severely ill prisoners had a chance of returning home. Now, sick men languished and died. The camps were never built for long-term confinement, and none were ready to become warehouses for tens of thousands of abandoned soldiers.
 
Draft Riots and the Class Divide
 
As men rotted in prison camps, 1863 also marked the beginning of federal conscription in the North. The Enrollment Act required all non-disabled males aged 20 to 45 to register for the draft. But there was a catch: the wealthy could buy their way out. For $300, roughly a year's wage for a laborer, any man could hire a substitute to serve in his place.
 
This injustice led to an eruption. The New York City Draft Riots in July 1863 saw working-class Irish immigrants violently protest conscription. Their anger wasn't just about being drafted. It was about being poor. Wealthy men could pay to avoid the carnage, but they were the ones giving the speeches and printing the newspapers demanding more troops.
 
The Confederacy introduced its draft as early as 1862 but with even more explicit favoritism. The so-called "Twenty Negro Law" exempted any white man who owned twenty or more slaves, under the argument that he was needed at home to manage labor. The result was the same: the burden of war fell disproportionately on people with low incomes, both North and South.
 
War Without a Way Out
 
By the end of 1863, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many of them conscripts, found themselves locked in a war with no parole, no exchange, and little chance of escape. They fought under commanders who could not guarantee their safe return if captured. Those unlucky enough to fall into enemy hands faced starvation, exposure, and slow death in overcrowded prison stockades.
 
Meanwhile, politicians debated terms, generals eyed casualty figures, and the rich bought their exemptions. The war was supposed to be about Union or independence, freedom or states' rights, but for the men in the trenches and behind barbed wire, it became something far simpler: survival.
 
The failure of the exchange system in 1863 was more than a policy change. It symbolized the hardening of a brutal war into a total war, in which even the rules of basic humanity collapsed. It exposed the sharp economic divide between those who gave orders and those who bore the brunt of the bloodshed. And in the shadows of Elmira, Andersonville, and Camp Douglas, it left a legacy of suffering that still stains the memory of the Civil War.