The reality of the Civil W;ir prison camp has long .since gone from Ii u man knowledge, The camps themselves have vanished, although in a few places there are quiet parks to mark their sites, each with a cemetery: thousands of men died. North and South, in those camps, and the headstones are there as reminders. Rut the names that once were so terrible, Andersonville and Elmira, Libby and (lamp Douglas and the rest, are just Civil War names now, out of a past that no one really remembers.

The reality of the Civil W;ir prison camp has long .since gone from Ii u man knowledge, The camps themselves have vanished, although in a few places there are quiet parks to mark their sites, each with a cemetery: thousands of men died. North and South, in those camps, and the headstones are there as reminders. Rut the names that once were so terrible, Andersonville and Elmira, Libby and (lamp Douglas and the rest, are just Civil War names now, out of a past that no one really remembers.

Yet the living testimony remains in letters and memoirs written by men who had firsthand experience of the grimmest chapter in the story of that far-off war. and for a generation that looks back a century to America’s greatest time of troubles, these stories can be highly instructive. They help to take the romantic gloss off a war that has at times been made to look like a picturesque pageant: they pull a curtain aside and let us see that this fabled “war between brothers” was a matter of agony and death and bleak hopelessness for the people who were actually involved in it. They put the whole business back in focus, so to speak, and give us a better perspective on a vital hour in the American past.

Some thirty years after the war ended there was a man named I'.zra H. Ripple living in Scranton. Pennsylvania. He had served in the tjznd Pennsylvania Infantry: he had been a prisoner of war—first at Andersonville, Ccorgia, then in a camp at Florence, South Carolina—from July g, i8(i|, to Mardi i, iSOg: and in the postwar years he had prospered as a businessman and a civic leader, becoming mayor of Scranton and then postmaster. In the nineties he sat down to write the story of his prison-camp experiences in order that members of his family could know what he had been through: to make the account more vivid he retained a New York artist, James U. Taylor, who had done many illustrations of Civil War scenes, to do some color sketches to accompany his text. Ripple seems to have worked carefully with Taylor. going over the rough drafts of the sketches to make sure that they showed things accurately. Eventually the manuscript and the illustrations were given to the Lackawanna Historical Society at Scranton, where they now repose.

By arrangement with the Society, A