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 over 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 nonhuman communities swirled and overlapped to create a fascinating, if understudied, narrative of the Civil War.

‘Matthew M. Stith reconstructs the largely forgotten history of a Confederate prison to examine broader themes of community, survival, and postwar memory. Well written and deeply researched, Camp Ford’s Civil War is an absorbing study, raising important questions about what Americans forget and what they remember about their civil war.’

Lesley J. Gordon - author of Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War

‘In his important new book, Matthew M. Stith shines a welcome new light on the darkest corner of the Confederacy. Camp Ford’s Civil War is more than just a long-overdue history of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi. Deftly using the tools of social, environmental, and cultural histories, Stith repays readers with his deep and careful probing of the community forged by the singular experience of captivity in our costliest war. Imaginatively conceived and gracefully written--building connections between landscapes real and imagined, built and natural--this book is a feat of modern Civil War scholarship.’

Brian Matthew Jordan - author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War