Book Review: The “Immortal Six Hundred” and the Failure of the Civil War POW Exchange Process

The “Immortal Six Hundred” and the Failure of the Civil War POW Exchange Process. By John F. Schmutz. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2025. Softcover, 307 pp. $75.00.

Reviewed by Lucas R. Clawson

John Schmutz’s goal with this book is to use “The Immortal Six Hundred” as a case study to show how the prisoner-of-war exchange process failed during the Civil War. The Immortal Six Hundred was a group of six hundred Confederate officers whom the Federal government held and mistreated in retaliation for alleged abuses against Union prisoners held in and near Charleston, South Carolina.

Schmutz succeeds in telling detailed stories of The Immortal Six Hundred. The reader learns all the details of who they were, their backgrounds, where and how many of them became prisoners, and the gory details of their confinement at Morris Island, South Carolina, Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, and the Federal POW prison at Fort Delaware. If you want to know basically all of the specifics about The Immortal Six Hundred during their confinement, read this book.

As a study of the POW exchange process and its failings, it falls a bit short. Schmutz does give a lot of information on the cartels created to exchange Union and Confederate prisoners. He also provides a lengthy discussion about how he feels the Lincoln administration and Ulysses S. Grant, as commander of the U.S. Army, unceremoniously ended the exchange process and exacerbated the sufferings of both Union and Confederate prisoners of war. But where he misses the mark is in contextualizing the discussions about POWs as part of both governments’ war aims, policies, their abilities to carry out a war of such magnitude, and, quite importantly, with the war’s memory and legacy.

Schmutz acknowledges his pro-Confederate leanings, allowing readers to clearly see his own perspective and letting them know where he personally stands. But the narrative often reads more like a laundry list of Yankee atrocities, peppered with statements about both sides’ failings, than an elucidation of a terrible situation from The Immortal Six Hundred survivors’ viewpoints. The book feels heavy-handed, hitting the reader over the head with every instance of the U.S. government’s failure to treat these men with dignity, humanity, and fairness. It also seems disjointed in its discussions of the POW exchange process and the discussions behind its creation, operation, and eventual failure.

Schmutz misses an opportunity to start a frank and difficult discussion about how people like The Immortal Six Hundred got caught up in the momentous political, economic, and military events of the Civil War and ended up suffering beyond belief. What we get is Schmutz’s view from 2025 and not the view from the war and its aftermath. This is a subtle distinction to make, because Schmutz does use hundreds of primary source materials from both sides, particularly those of The Immortal Six Hundred themselves. What we miss, though, are the feelings of animosity, distrust, and outright hatred that existed throughout the Union and the Confederacy for their foes, how those feelings came to be, and how they contributed to the mistreatment of prisoners.

Readers would benefit from pairing Schmutz’s work with Phillip S. Paludan’s Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (1981, reprint 2004), which covers similar ground. With Victims, Paludan does a deep dive into the Shelton Laurel Massacre, which was the January 1863 execution of 13 alleged Unionist bushwhackers by a Confederate infantry regiment in western North Carolina. The important part of Paludan’s book, and why it is mentioned here, is the discussion of how a mass execution like that could happen and why the event was largely swept under the carpet despite widespread contemporary outrage. Paludan takes the reader through social, military, political, and economic factors that drove people to do extreme, irrational, and immoral things. He doesn’t make an excuse for the incident, he helps the reader understand why and how it could happen by trying to explain the context of the event and the resulting mindsets of those who were there. Paludan wants his readers to get a better view of the world from 1863 and think about how to apply it to the present.

The story of The Immortal Six Hundred is incredibly important and one that more people should know. These men’s tragedies and triumphs, especially in their postwar lives, are an indelible part of the Civil War. Their stories should start hard conversations about POWs and their treatment by governments in conflict. Schmutz’s book, despite its shortcomings, is a reminder that these people existed and that we need to keep talking about them.

Lucas R. Clawson is an independent scholar based in Lebanon, Oregon. Lucas has spent over two decades in the public history field, interpreting the Civil War with the National Park Service, Maryland State Parks, and with numerous public and private institutions in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Lucas’s Civil War research includes artillery, the U.S. Navy, African American refugees, business during the war, and the war’s legacy.