As many as 420,000 men were imprisoned during the American Civil War. Both Union and Confederate prisons were filthy, mismanaged, and deadly. Yet they were also places where captured soldiers thought about the meaning of the war and their role in it. This was especially the case in Union prisons for Confederate soldiers. In this talk, Williams will show how captured prisoners’ dispositions to think and reflect also led them to record their own memories. In the process, they assembled a vast, useable archive of Confederate reminiscences that have had a lasting effect on popular understandings of the Civil War to the present day.