The Captured Scout of the Army of the James: A Sketch of the Life of Sergeant Henry H. Manning, of the Twenty-Fourth Mass. Regiment

A rare glimpse into the inferno of Andersonville through the eyes of a man who lived to tell it, and who died keeping a promise made to God in the darkness of a Confederate prison. Henry H. Manning enlisted in the Twenty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment as a young man driven by patriotism and faith, only to find himself captured and thrust into one of the most notorious POW camps in American history. What follows is a harrowing chronicle of survival: the overcrowded pens, the starvation, the failed escape attempts chased by bloodhounds through Georgia swampland. Yet this is no simple war story. Trumbull traces the arc of a soul under extreme duress, Manning's faith sustaining him through eighteen months of brutality, and his desperate vow to God that would ultimately cost him his life once he was free. This 1869 account captures something often lost in Civil War histories: the interior landscape of a man who saw the worst humanity had to offer and chose, somehow, to hold onto belief.