Symposium 2026 Spotlight: Partners in Escape
Welcome back to our spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue previewing of our speaker’s presentations for the 2026 Emerging Civil War Symposium. This week we feature Dr. Angela Zombeck’s topic:
Union and Confederate soldiers perhaps dreaded imprisonment more than battlefield conflict since it meant the loss of freedom and opportunity for battlefield glory. General Order No. 100 (the Lieber Code, 1863) did not consider POW escape attempts to be a crime, so Union and Confederate prisoners partnered in mass escape attempts, identified and bribed sympathetic guards, or escaped on their own and collaborated with civilians or soldiers to reach their own lines. POWs’ thoughts of escape more often led to psychological comfort than actual emancipation from prison, but the prospect of freedom often helped them to withstand captivity.
For more information on the 2026 Emerging Civil War Symposium and to purchase tickets, click here.
This looks incredibly intriguing, especially the observation that escapes (attempted and realized) were not considered “crimes” under the Lieber Code. Thus, the “captured/captor” collaboration! LOL.
From a broader perspective, what constitutes “intellectual popcorn” for me personally is to juxtapose the expected standards of POW behavior under the Lieber Code and what eventually materialized in the US military “Code of Conduct” for Americans captured and imprisoned in later wars. These were much more restrictive in terms of POW behavior (from an intelligence perspective-) yet calling for more aggressive attempts to resist and escape. Culling through William Miller’s landmark work “Masters of the Air” and Rozell’s insightful verbal history series on “What Our Father’s Saw” in WWII, I think one can draw “tentative” or “parallel” conclusions of the experience of American POW’s from 1864 to 1945, not ignoring the experience of American patriots on hellish British “prison ships” in the Revolutionary War that we celebrate this very year.
I’ve done extensive research and study into the entire POW/Prison Camps line of historical inquiry as a “sidebar” to endeavoring to understand both John Wilke’s Booth’s and the Confederate governments interest in “springing” prisoners with the hope they could rejoin the dwindling ranks of the Confederate armies. On a different plane, in my previous classes at National Defense University on the Just War Tradition decomposing jus ad bellum or why a nation-state enters in a war in the first places (motives; causes) and jus in bello (ethical conduct in warfare – – a principle arguably largely disregarded in the Western Theatre).
Bottom line: The Lieber Code was an amazing piece of jurisprudence, seldom understood and so “pliable” to the extant exigencies of military operations in the American Civil War. Kind of like the infamous “Rubber Room” where Lincoln died: Fungible and expandable to fit military operation exigencies. Not a sermon-Just a thought.
Colonel (Ret.) Paul Severance. US Army, Ph.D.
Retired Professor of Military Science, the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy
Faculty, The Osher Institute, The College of William and Mary
Faculty, Institute for Life-Long Learning, Christopher Newport University
Faculty, Blue-Gray Education Society