I love this book. It tells the story of Union prisoners who escaped in the final months of the confederacy. They traveled hundreds of miles, helped by slaves, mountain Unionist and Confederate deserters. It really gave me a lot of insight into the mountain people, the slaves and the Union prisoners. White supremacy is the real plague on America. As is Covid_19. But there's hope still. ( )

Having read some of the author's previous scholarship I had mixed expectations, in that I expected to be informed but not necessarily engaged. I was pleased to discover that I was actually entertained, as the memoirs of the Union escaped prisoners give real dash to an analysis of the Confederacy's sociological and political collapse in 1864-1865. The real heroes and heroines coming out of this story are the slaves and white loyalist women who put their lives on the line on a regular basis for the sake of those escaping the reach of Confederate governance. As for Foote's epilogue regarding this maelstrom, while she finds little sense of organized Confederate malice against its prisoners, you couldn't tell this to the actual prisoners who survived, and their embittered remembrances created the traditional "Andersonville" narrative. Foote also has the sense that the whole structure and logistics of the Confederate and Union POW systems, and the entailed costs, are worthy of further examination. ( )

During the last 18 months or so of the Civil War, the Confederacy as a state began to break down. One consequence is it didn't have enough resource to guard Union captives. As a result many of them got loose and wondered around North and South Carolina. Add to this slaves who helped them, union sympathizers, and citizen vigilantes and it was something of a free for all. Lorien Foote interweaves a number of stories in a somewhat chaotic manner perhaps reflecting the chaos of the times. Many curious incidents abound. There are few things more reliably interesting than the "escape narrative", be it frontier settlers escaping from Indians, slaves escaping to freedom or escaped soldiers during war. Foote gives a taste of a number of these accounts showing how widespread and consequential the problem was for the Confederate war effort. ( )