100 Books Like Kidnapped at Sea

Since I plowed my way through this rollicking 800-page epic, I have eagerly recommended it to others. It ranks as one of a select few long books that never bogged down and left me with a twinge of sadness that it did not just keep going.

When the curtain finally fell (as I knew it would, upon Confederate collapse in 1865), I had been enthralled by dozens of expertly drawn characters and episodes. Some of the ministers, soldiers, and publicists appear once or twice; others provide a narrative spine that charts developments across the entire struggle.

Collectively, this dramatis personae restores the drama to what less gifted story-tellers than Foreman have termed “Anglo-American relations” in the battle for and against the Confederate rebellion.

As soon as I encountered Don Doyle’s elegant formulation of the Civil War’s “public diplomacy,” I knew it would move future accounts of the 1860s in exciting new directions. That seemingly simple term, offered as a key concept for the book as a whole, drew into focus how advocates of North and South shaped the overseas responses to Americans’ military conflagration.

Its fast-paced series of chapters provided me a newfound appreciation for the relatively understudied responses of the French, Italian, and German publics.

With strikingly clear prose, the book helped me understand how a transfixing North American war spurred a frothy worldwide discussion about the future prospects of popular government, bound labor, and national self-preservation.

Several of the seven former slaves brought to life in Richard Blackett’s classic work pursued trans-Atlantic reform long before American disunion. Nothing like this book has appeared since its publication, and so I find myself poking around, always with great pleasure, in the taut, dramatic stories of Black émigrés like J. Sella Martin, William and Ellen Craft, and William Howard Day. Their vivid lives demonstrate the unique value of stories told by those with first-hand experience of Southern slavery.

The polished biographies pair these freed people’s quest to impugn the Confederacy with other commitments and takes pains to place interest in America alongside a concern for Africa, the Caribbean, and for a Europe yet to provide color-blind justice for all.

Confederate Raphael Semmes had drawn many biographers before Stephen Fox’s 2007 account of his Civil War high seas exploits. Fox’s book immediately established itself as the best told of the lot, a result of the author’s writerly skill and his gifted delineation of character.

The book has established itself as the one that I and other historians return to time and again for its authoritative account of how the two warships under Semmes’ command traveled by sail and steam over tens of thousands of miles, as they wreaked havoc on vessels operating near five continents, across the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. In burning dozens of prizes across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, the tale of infamy exemplified the global scope of Civil War belligerency.

This authoritative book is the first comprehensive study of all major Civil War prisons—North and South. Speer traces the development of the POW facilities the various types used throughout the war from barren ground affairs to the infamous barren stockades—like Andersonville. We learn about the system of prisoner exchange created in the crisis and how it broke down, including how the taking of African-American prisoners ultimately spelled doom for the cartel. Speer traces the development of the POW facilities and the various types used throughout the war, from barren ground affairs to the infamous barren stockades—like Andersonville. This essential tool helps us categorize prisons by type, years they existed, capacity, escapes, and number of deaths.

When you’re taught to believe the other side is full of evil people, what do you do when you come face-to-face with a gallant enemy? This story was fascinating because the heroine disguises herself as a soldier, only to become a prisoner of war. When her foe becomes her ally, her loyalties are put to the test. I love how this book deals with the “us versus them” mentality and breaks down the walls we try to erect between us.  

The definitive work on the Elmira POW Camp, Michael Gray’s book is a captivating account of life inside the pen on the Chemung River. Especially valuable is Gray’s account of Elmira’s management by the post commanders, commandants, Commissary General of Prisoners and its supervision by the War Department. It is a web of intrigue and even conspiracy. Another important aspect of this path-breaking book is the micro-economy that was created by the prisoners, who kept themselves busy by catching and selling rats, making jewelry, and other ornaments, and fostering a marketplace where tobacco was the primary medium of exchange.

Andersonville was a groundbreaking novel about the war because it told the tragic story of the infamous Andersonville Prison (official name: Camp Sumter), located in Andersonville, Georgia. Andersonville was only in operation for a little over a year; however, during that time 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there, and nearly 13,000 died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure. In this remarkable novel, Kantor revealed a little-known aspect of the war that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of Civil War soldiers and their families. The prison camps in both the north and south were inhumane and even cruel institutions, often more deadly than the battles themselves. Kantor’s novel explores this phenomenon through the use of multiple points of view (like several of the novels on this list).

This intriguing collection of essays explores the dark reaches of Civil War prison scholarship from a variety of viewpoints and professions—including historians, anthropologists and public historians. The eclectic mix of topics includes environment, race, material culture, memory, and more. One of the more interesting aspects explored here is the phenomenon of prison camps which became tourist attractions—such as Johnson’s Island off Sandusky, Ohio—where steamboats would ply the waters around the island so guests might be able to spot an actual Rebel officer.

A native of Elmira, Horigan sought to uncover the grisly story of the Elmira prisoner of war camp and why it was so deadly to its inhabitants. Not only does he reveal the constellation of hardships faced by prisoners, but a story of retribution which he pins on the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and the penny-pinching Commissary General of Prisoners William Hoffman. In the end, Horigan lays out a damning indictment, which he carefully enumerates in his conclusion, of the conduct of the War Department and Officers overseeing the Elmira camp who he blames for the great suffering and death along the banks of the Chemung River in 1864-1865.