Capture and Escape: A Narrative of Army and Prison Life

In the summer of 1864, Union Captain John Azor Kellogg marched with the Iron Brigade toward the Rapidan River, unaware he would spend the next months in Confederate dungeons. This memoir chronicles the brutal transformation from soldier to prisoner: the chaos of battle, the shattering moment of defeat, and the harrowing transfer through enemy territory to Lynchburg's notorious prisons. Kellogg writes with the detachment of a man who has seen too much, yet his account pulses with the desperate ingenuity of prisoners plotting escape, the fierce bonds forged in shared suffering, and the grim calculus of survival under conditions designed to break men. His narrative captures what few Civil War accounts do: not the glory of battle, but the suffocating monotony and terror of captivity, where each day stretches into an eternity behind bars. This is history from the ground, where the war's abstractions become flesh, hunger, and the faint hope of freedom.